Joseph K. Black

Social Media Experiment Gone Horribly Wrong

Mon Feb 28 04:46:25 CST 2011

Update: On October 31, 2011, Joseph K. Black was arrested by Nebraska police officers
after a 35 minute car chase spanning four counties, during what was described as
one of his psychotic episodes. For more details and the police reports,
read all about it. In addition,
a full criminal history on Black is available.

Given the inane amount of
babble to come from Joseph K. Black via Facebook and Twitter in late January of 2011, we'll spare everyone a lot of
the gory details and just post a few short examples of why Black will not only never obtain his dream job
of National Cybersecurity Advisor, but will likely end up working the counter at a Runza near you some time
in the near future, provided he doesn't end up in prison.

Simply put, Black has designs on being appointed "National Cybersecurity Advisor" by the Obama administration.
While that in itself may be an admirable goal, Black seems to think that self-promotion, being top 10 on search
results and outlandish claims
through social media outlets will help his cause more than, say, actual experience and contributions to the
security industry ("cyber" or otherwise). Moving into February, his big thing became some fictional
"megacommunity" ("Google it!" he says) with imaginary ties to every government agency, big service provider and
anything else that he fancies.

The @Gregory_D_Evans Twitter account summed it all up very nicely in one tweet:

It should be noted that before Black "went full retard" as mentioned above, Lyger did try to personally and
privately contact Black twice via email to open a dialogue. Neither email was answered:

Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:56:38 -0600 (CST)
From: lyger (lyger@attrition.org)
To: j.black@blackbergsecurity.us
Subject: Black & Berg intent
Hi Joe,
I've noticed over the past few days that you've mentioned Black & Berg
over a few different social media outlets (most noticeably Twitter and
Facebook). Some of the posts have been somewhat curious to say the least:
http://www.facebook.com/cyberweapons/posts/149401075115575
http://twitter.com/JosephKBlack/statuses/29056293369020416
Since you apparently have various security industry certifications, I'm
curious about your reasoning behind some of the comments I (as well
as other professionals in the security industry) have seen. This isn't
intended to be a criticism, just reaching out to see if your messages are
intended to be serious, a marketing ploy, a mixture of both, or something
else we haven't quite figured out yet.

Whether he's just overzealous, delusional, a net-kook, or a simple troll,
we're done with him. Desperate and irrelevant, Black has had his 15 minutes
of notoriety (not "fame", as he probably thinks) and like all good trolls,
his time too has passed. He isn't relevant enough to include on Errata: Charlatan,
so he ended up here, on Postal: Asshats.